Anthropologist observes native academics in their natural habitat

Posted March 23, 2006; 04:54 p.m.

by Jennifer Greenstein Altmann

When Rena Lederman settles into her chair at a faculty meeting or
an academic conference, she is not just performing her duties as a member of
Princeton’s anthropology department. She is doing fieldwork.

The subjects of Lederman’s current research are not the type that
come to mind when one thinks of anthropology. They are not members of a tribe
in Papua New Guinea or Madagascar. They are the academics among whom she works
every day.

Lederman, who is an associate professor, is writing a book called
“Anthropology Among the Disciplines,” which will examine the distinctions among
several academic fields and explore how and when those borders become
important. In an era when academia is emphasizing interdisciplinarity, Lederman
sees significant differences in how anthropologists, sociologists, historians
and social psychologists approach their fields.

While Lederman also studies library and Internet sources, much of
her understanding comes from interacting with her fellow academics in their
natural habitat — during committee meetings and lunches, at department
gatherings and dinner parties, even when she picks up one of her children from
school.

“Fieldwork is all about serendipity and seizing unexpected
opportunities,” she said. One of her colleagues, she remarked, refers to the
method anthropologists use for gathering information as “deep hanging out.”
Lederman is not doing formal interviews with her colleagues — rather, following
the same approach she took in her earlier fieldwork in Papua New Guinea, she
tells them about her interests whenever she can and does her best to follow
their lead in the ensuing conversation.

“My topic is not conventional perhaps, but my approach is classic
participant observation: I attend closely to how disciplinary distinctions come
up in everyday conversations,” Lederman said. “I pay attention to how scholars
in one field talk about other fields or how they might defend their own if they
feel it’s being challenged. When we counterpose our own and others’ ways of
making sense of the world, methodological and ethical values are expressed that
might otherwise seem trivial or too obvious to mention.”

“She’s one of a handful of people who’s taking the opportunity to
reflect ethnographically on the kinds of institutional lives that academics
live,” said Don Brenneis, a professor of anthropology at the University of
California-Santa Cruz. “It’s complicated for different reasons when you’re
working with your own tribe. She is taking the invisibility of events such as
committee meetings and making them — if not transparent — then understandable.
She thinks constantly about context and about the broader implications of
relatively small activities.”

To tease out differences among disciplines, Lederman examines
scandals or disputes closely. “They’re a window on the background assumptions
that define these disciplines, the tacit conventions that people don’t normally
go on about,” she said. Not only is there plenty for Lederman to read about
such controversies, but people also love to talk about them.

One striking difference in the background assumptions of
anthropology and neighboring disciplines is the use of deception or intimacy as
research tools, said Lederman. For example, cultural anthropologists and social
psychologists agree that valid results ought to be based on observing realistic
social interaction; however, their methods for getting those results differ
dramatically.

Valid social psychological research aims for “experimental
realism”: Research conditions need to be controlled but the behavior of
research subjects needs to be realistic nevertheless. A standard technique for
achieving experimental realism is to devise ingenious modes of deceiving
participants about the true nature of what is being studied, after which those
participants must be properly “debriefed.” An example is a scenario in which
volunteers interact with other people they believe are also volunteers while
waiting to be called in to participate in a psychology experiment. In fact,
their interaction in the waiting room actually involves the psychologist’s
confederates and is the experiment the psychologist is observing.

Cultural anthropologists do not generally use experimentation and
the deceptions it sometimes requires. “Social psychologists may look askance at
anthropologists’ conventional methods,” Lederman said. “Fieldwork involves
uncontrolled social encounters. We go wherever people live and work, describe
our research interests in terms that we hope will engage our interlocutors’ own
concerns, and do our best to learn from them by remaining deeply involved for
quite a while. Many of us end fieldwork with a very different project than the
one with which we began.”

In addition to exploring the different research methods in her
current project, Lederman is designing a new course for spring 2007 on “The
Uses of Deception in Magic and Science” with support from the Humanities
Council’s David A. Gardner ’69 Magic Project.

Ethnographically attentive

Lederman’s unconventional project follows more than two decades of
experience doing ethnographic research, including three years spent studying
gender roles, gift exchange and historical transformations in the Highlands of
Papua New Guinea. Lederman has taught at Princeton since 1981, starting just
before she completed her Ph.D. at Columbia University.

Since one of her areas of expertise is research methods, she
teaches courses on the history and ethics of anthropological fieldwork to
undergraduate and graduate students. She also teaches courses on Pacific
cultures, gender and economic anthropology.

Carey Faber, a junior who recently took Lederman’s methods class
“Ethnographer’s Craft,” has found her approachable and illuminating as a
professor. “Her anthropological versatility is evident, as she seems to
identify with all of her students’ anthropological interests and is able to
guide all of us,” Faber said.

“Professor Lederman seems to have thought of everything,” said Irit
Rasooly, a junior in the same class. “Her creative syllabus incorporates a
variety of media, ranging from an online ethics certification program to an
innovative textbook, from readings of ethnographic accounts to hands-on
exercises designed to allow us to practice the skills we study in theory. Her
class is not confined to the three hours a week we spend in seminar; she
expects us to be engaged with her and with each other through online postings,
class e-mails, group work and guided field experience.”

Lederman also expects her students to be “ethnographically
attentive” in everyday contexts. Her other major research project fell into her
lap in just that way, when she was hanging out with her father and his friends.
The project focuses on the way in which science is perceived in American
popular culture.

“We have a kind of contradiction in the United States: On the one
hand, one of our country’s claims to fame is its scientific achievements. But,
on the other hand, if you ask people on the street about science, they’re
alienated from it,” she said. “There’s a lot of worry on the part of scientists
that the general population is scientifically illiterate, and a pervasive sense
that science education isn’t what it should be.”

That dichotomy comes up often in conversations among her father and
his friends. Leon Lederman is a physicist who won the Nobel Prize in 1988. Now
83, the former Columbia and University of Chicago professor promotes
innovations in science education.

His daughter is beginning to tackle the problem by examining how
journalists and K-12 teachers acquire and disseminate scientific knowledge.
“These folks mediate between laypeople and experts,” Lederman said. “I’m
familiarizing myself with the work of these science ‘translators’ so as to
understand their double binds, and what they think gets lost or added in
translation.”

Like Lederman, her students are learning to pay close attention to
routine encounters with friends and family, aware that those conversations
could lead to anthropological insights.

Jesse Davie-Kessler, a member of the class of 2006, said she has
learned from Lederman that “the smallest gestures and the most casual
interactions hold cultural meaning. I have begun to see my everyday life in a
new way — it has become a sort of text for my anthropological research.”